He jumped up to give me hound kisses.
“Where have you been?” I asked. “Can you show me the way?”
My dog turned slightly to the right of the direction I had been walking. He looked over his shoulder and barked again.
“I’m coming,” I said.
He moved quickly, but I managed to keep him in sight until he passed through a creaking gate that appeared out of the storm as if it, too, had been called. A low fence of rough wood spread to the left and the right, with both sides vanishing into the storm. The gate wasn’t any taller than my waist, and had been tied to the side so it didn’t close. It groaned and banged on the fence, but the rope holding it in place held.
I touched the fence. It seemed the correct thing to do, to show this place some reverence. “Hello,” I said, as if the cottage would talk to me the same way as Sal. But no one responded, so I stepped through.
It still snowed on the other side, but the wind diminished. To my left, a gigantic tree towered into the storm above. In the shadows between the trunk and the fence, a small herd of whitetail deer huddled—a few does, two or three yearlings, and the biggest buck I’d ever seen, with a good fifteen-point set of antlers. He snorted at my dog but continued to shelter in place.
The tree’s branches were full of critters—squirrels, songbirds, and up high, I could just make out a bald eagle.
To my right, in a small courtyard filled with a woodpile, sat a doghouse, a frozen pond, an old hand-operated water pump, and several other snow-covered objects. A raccoon family watched me from inside the doghouse, and a fox huddled behind the woodpile.
None of the animals seemed too concerned about me, or my dog. They knew they were safe here, with the tree and the seer.
Her name was Ellie Jones. Marcus Aurelius had found her first, and had led her to my lake because that water pump hadn’t worked. She’d needed to wash one of her photos.
I’d taken her to Lara’s, and I’d gotten her the first phone.
She liked muffins.
And she’d saved me from Dracula.
Then I’d done something dumb. Ellie had cried. She’d left her bike. And she’d kissed me.
She’d kissed me at Bjorn’s church, too.
“Ellie,” I whispered.
Marcus Aurelius looked over his shoulder again, then back at the cottage in front of both of us. Candlelight glowed in the window off to the side of the wooden door.
Marcus Aurelius ran up to the door. He pawed. He barked.
The door opened.
“There you are!” She wore only a nightgown and socks, and the candlelight behind her backlit her shape. She hugged my cold, wet dog. “I was so worried.” She sounded as if she was about to cry. “Did you find the kids? Are they okay?”
Marcus Aurelius backed away from her. He turned toward me, and barked again.
She looked up and shaded her eyes.
He ran back into the courtyard.
“Marcus Aurelius! Come!” she called. “The cottage is about to close up for the night.”
She stepped out into the snow.
“Ellie.” I was still by the tree, still in the shadows with the critters and out of the shaft of light flowing out of her door.
She touched her open lips. “Frank?” she called.
I stepped into the light. “There was an elf. The kids…” Why was I at a loss for words? “They’re okay, Ellie. They found us. Axlam’s okay. The elf said St. Martin’s gone and that I should come this way and…”
“Frank!” Ellie ran into the snow in her stocking feet and her nightgown. She pressed through the wind and the ice. And Ellie jumped into my snow-covered, near-frozen arms. “Oh, Frank.”
“I’m as cold as the blizzard,” I said, but I held on anyway. “You’ll freeze.” The cottage sheltered us from the worst of the storm, but the air—and my body—were still freezing cold.
“I don’t care. I don’t. I don’t care.” She kissed me like she had at the church—as if she believed our time together would go away all too soon. She hiccupped, and tears touched my cold neck. “You’re here,” she whispered.
Somewhere, in the grand tree, a sweet, small bell tinkled.
Ellie looked up. “The cottage is about to close.”
Marcus Aurelius, backlit by the candles, waited patiently just inside the door. That cottage sheltered my dog. The tree sheltered the life of the forest. And right now, the beautiful, shivering woman in my arms needed sheltering, too.
Like me, she’d been too long unmoored in her own storm.
“I remember everything,” I said.
Her hiccups turned to sobs. “Come inside,” she said. “Please.”
She wanted me with her. She wanted me to stay.
I pulled her tightly to my cold body and did the best I could to offer the shelter she needed—I carried the woman I loved toward her own blizzard of magic.
Epilogue
Dagrun Tyrsdottir leaned against the altar fashioned from both living and dead ash. Like Frank, the altar was more alive than dead, though it did have a root or two still in Hel’s domain.
Some things neither the World Tree nor her adopted son could avoid.
Her wrist, the one broken by Frank’s unholy “brother,” had fractured again, and throbbed under a layer of healing magic that was, at the moment, not doing its job.
There was a corruption here, one strong enough to trigger something in Frank. Something that she’d sensed as she’d been fighting the insect St. Martin’s magic. Her adopted son had subconsciously called out into the Realms—all the Realms, not just those accessible by Alfheim’s elves—for reinforcements.
Should she blame Salvation for training Frank’s mind for such calls? Or perhaps this was the sensitivity she and Arne had always felt in him. The second one, beyond his synesthetic ability to see magic.
He was not mundane, this they knew. Nor was he a jotunn. The jotnar were not the giants so claimed by the faulty readings of the ancient texts done by myopic mundanes. Nor were
